Mobile devices, such as cellular telephones, are rapidly growing in prevalence. As such, users are beginning to expect not only communication from mobile devices, but a wide variety of computational services as well. To facilitate this wider variety of services, it is often beneficial to be able to determine the identity of a speaker based on that person's voice. Making this determination is known in the art as speaker verification. Speaker verification is possible because the patterns of acoustical energy which constitute human speech vary from person to person.
Speaker verification offers many benefits to the user interface of mobile devices. Speaker verification may allow authenticating users for access to computational services offered via mobile devices. It can also be used to personalize the user experience for the specific individual accessing the service. It is noted that speaker verification also may enhance systems other than mobile devices. Broadly speaking, speech-based interfaces are suitable for a wide variety of access and operational requirements. Speaker verification enhances any speech-based interface, thus helping adapt systems with traditional user interfaces to work well under unusual operational requirements. For example, a speech-based interface with speaker verification may facilitate a human who does not have full use of his hands in using a computer system normally operated via a keyboard and mouse. Furthermore, speaker verification may be used to accomplish biometric authentication on any type of system regardless of its user interface.